New feature request

[Pékélé]

Hi, it's been a long time !
I've worked a lot with PL32 and i thought about some possible features to add :

-Stoping a process by hitting the ESC keyboard's touch. Sometime a bad use, make a long process and there is nothing to stop it and go back.

-A close path function for the filling tool would be nice. With a parameter in mm or pixel in the option toolbox where the path needs to be closed.

-A better brush feeling, like in other paint software or ink software. It is just an artist wish I understand this is not the goal of PL32

Well that's all, this software is really great and can do profesionnal work.
You can go here and see some of my work done with it :

http://www.comicspace.com/pekele/

cheers

Pékélé

[greenmorpher]

Hey, Pékélé

Some excellent work there. Is PL 32 part of your work flow to produce the cartoons? Do you draw them in PL 32, using a tablet for example? Or draw them on paper, then scan into PL 32 for colouring? (I know a guy who does cartoons like that in another program.)

I wsould be interested to know.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes" -- Revealed! The secrets of how you can use type and layout to turbocharge your messages in print. See the book at http://www.worsleypress.com

[Pékélé]

Hey ! Thanks !

I use PL32 as a photoshop killer
I mainly used Pl32 for colouring. Inking on computer is not an easy task.
I found 2 other software that can do that.
Anyway, what is great with PL32 is the possibility to transform into vector your hand scanned ink.
Then you can add color on a bitmap layer and keep you ink in vector. Finalyy you can export the drawing into pdf format which keep the ink vector and gives a real nice touch to the result. It gives too a better pre-press file that is not heavy, 3Mo 4Mo.

In fact it would be nice to have a pixel correction in the brush's option palette. That would make ink process possible.

Try vectorize your ink, it is a really good tips !


For PL32 team :
About request : it would be nice to improve pdf export. Vector shape with gradient color are pixelised. Keep it in vector would make better document rendering.
-a pixel correction in the brush's option palette for smooth inking

[greenmorpher]

Interesting, Pékélé, many thanks for your explanation.

I was interested because I have just bought my wife a tablet -- so she instantly sketched a cartoon figure. All I could sketch is a crooked line. It's unfair!

She is an artist of some ability and also a poet (in Portuguese) and wants to illustrate her poetry for a book. I'll advise her of your technique and see how she goes.

I agree about the "Photoshop killer". PL 32 is a pretty damned amazing program.

Pixel correction?

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes" -- Revealed! The secrets of how you can use type and layout to turbocharge your messages in print. See the book at http://www.worsleypress.com

[Pékélé]

Boa tarde Geoff

you welcome.
It is easy to have a nice ink with PL32. Create a image in B&W or grayscale. Draw with the tablet. Then convert the layer into vector ( menu : layer -> convert layer. chose vector ).
Then i should advise you to optimise the vector : document->vector->optimise vector
Do some tries with the option. It depends on the resolution, but in 300 dpi try 5 for the line and 1 for the curves.

You will see the beautiful drawing. Now you just have to create a layer for the colour and pick with the fill tool... easy. Don't hesitate to ask if you need to.

In fact i'm asking of an option where you can specify a number of pixel where the ink is "corrected ". It can be close from the optimise vector option. I don't now if it is clear.

Tell your wife to go on playing around with PL32, it is really a great program.

cheers

Pékélé

[Hoogo]

Yes, cool comics. I did like "the gift" most.
I also sometimes use the conversion to vectors, but it's not for self painted pictures. At first I convert to Grayscale, then play with the histogram to let it look monochrome. With the histogram I can determine the threshold and make the lines mor thick or thin. At last I convert to monochrome before I convert to a vector.

For the fill-path-thing you could try this:
-duplicate the vector-layer
-convert the lower of them to grayscale
-Use filter > other > minimum with ie. 20 to let it bloat, then try maximum with i.e. 20. This will close holes of about 20 pixels, but it has quite some poor side-effects, I doubt that it is useful for your purpose.

[greenmorpher]

Boa tarde Geoff

... Tell your wife to go on playing around with PL32, it is really a great program.

Bom dia, Pékélé (and that's about the limit of my Portuguese!)

Actually, I am using PL 32 to provide me with higher level image functions to complement Canvas X, which is my main graphics and DTP program.

I haven't let my wife have a go at it yet! Right now, she is in Timor-Leste (she went yesterday) where she is going to be concentrating on training journalists (she's a radio and video journalist and broadcaster as well as an artist, photographer and poet) for a while, which gives me time to learn the ins-and-outs of the program a bit and do some of my own work. Her mode of learning of any program I know is to sit at her computer in the next room and shout questions ...

We are in Australia. Where are you located? Do you speak Portuguese or just know a few greetings?

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes" -- Revealed! The secrets of how you can use type and layout to turbocharge your messages in print. See the book at http://www.worsleypress.com

[greenmorpher]

Ola Pékélé

I forgot to say that I did note the Brazilian fighting dance -- a Brazilian friend of ours and a couple of others performed some of it at a festival here a while back. Stunning stuff.

What I also meant to say was I have been messing around with that image > vector tool -- amazing capability. I converted an 8 megapixel landscape photograph. My G4 took an age to process it, but PL showed no hesitation -- just munched away at the job until it was finished with each color/tint (whatever) as a separate layer. The result looked like a water color -- lioke you get if you apply, say, Noise Ninja for noise suppression, and go far too far.

Then I saved it as a PDF, which opened fine in Acrobat Reader. Reader acted surprised -- I was able to actually see individual layers loading into the image -- but handled it fine.

PL re-opened the PDF without problems, showing all the layers.

I thought that was pretty outstanding performance.

Canvas X (which has pretty good PDF tools) it froze after an hour of processing.

I've also been messing around with a few brush strokes and stuff transformed into vectors. I haven't quite got the hang of the layers yet, but I'm getting there.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes" -- Revealed! The secrets of how you can use type and layout to turbocharge your messages in print. See the book at http://www.worsleypress.com

[Gerhard Huber]

-Stoping a process by hitting the ESC keyboard's touch. Sometime a bad use, make a long process and there is nothing to stop it and go back.

Is this necessary? I have here a 12 MPix image and filling takes only up to 1 second.

-A close path function for the filling tool would be nice. With a parameter in mm or pixel in the option toolbox where the path needs to be closed.

That's not so easy. The computer can't recognise the "lines". The problem is that you get your "line" with the vectorize function. This doesn't really create "line" but "areas".
So I see only two ways to solve this problems:
- you can draw the lines directly with the vector tool. Then you will get real lines and I will provide a function for your purpose
- you use hoogos tip just before the vectorization

-A better brush feeling, like in other paint software or ink software. It is just an artist wish I understand this is not the goal of PL32

I will need more information about this. What is "brush feeling"?

Gerhard

[Pékélé]

Hoogo : thanks for the tips, i will try it.

Geoff : Canvas X is expensive ! I prefer less expensive software as PL32 or freeware. You should look to expression3, the mac's version is freeware.
I'm in France and i propose you to go on talking by email in order no to disturb too much this forum, i guess You will find my email on my profil and you are welcome.
By the way, I'm just like you about Portuguese speaking

Have a look at http://www.comicspace.com/pekele/comics ... ic_id=7630
I've just update this story. Pages were been coloured with PL32, some ink were done with Expression3. And the script is written by a talent australian writer.
talk soon

Gerhard :

well i'm trying to give some ideas with my use of PL32.
Maybe my computer is not as faster as yours, but sometimes, some process take long time. 3-5mn. This function exist in photoshop and other graphic program, so, for my use, it can improve PL32
But i agree with you on the fact that it is nor a necessary tool.

For the closepath function, i will use hugos tips, thanks !

For the brush feeling as the esc key interrupt, it is not important. As i wrote above the convert layer into vector and then optimise it give a very good result.
What i was trying to explain is a function that in range of some pixel correct the trajectory of the line being traced by the brush. For exemple when i trace with the brush on a 300 dpi document, the path is not right. It is not perfect, there are some tremors. The correcting tool should give a contraint to the tracing to smooth it in real time. I don't know if it is more clearer. I can post an image if you want to.

A Major improvement would be a better pdf exporting, with gradient vector shape stills in vector mode, no pixelised.

thanks for the answers and congratulation for this great software

Pékélé

[Koyaanis]

One small feature that seems to be missing, and I am always hunting for, is a way to move a text-editor layer while I'm still in text-edit mode. I can resize it all I want, I just can't move it as one whole layer (while still in editing mode). Could a simple "move" area be included in the far-left of the margins & tabs bar at the top? There seems to be plenty of room for a handle there. I keep wanting to click and drag that bar to a new position but then I realize I'm just setting a new tab-stop or margin by doing so. I find that I have to click on the layer-tool to view the text as a layer, then reposition it, then click on the text-tool again to go back to editing. It can be quite time consuming when trying to finely reposition things during editing when I find I need more room or font-size than I started with.

Also, I know its been discussed to death, but I too would LOVE having a way to run those "PhotoShop ONLY" plugins. It's a shame that some really nice ones require that I boot up PS to run them. It's the only reason I bother even keeping PhotoShop installed on my system. I wish I could delete PhotoShop completely and never have it darken my doorstep anymore. But I can't until I find an editor that will support the newer dedicated plugins. In the past, for freeware like IrfanView, we used to just copy over a couple of PS's DLL files to our /system32/ folder and the PS plugins would run fine for other editors. Couldn't some compatibility be created that way? Keeping a couple of Adobe's dll's on my system I can almost tolerate. Having their whole program on my computer is just a shameful sin and waste of good hard-drive space!

p.s. Can anything be done yet about keeping my plugins in order on a customized toolbar? When I add a new plugin to my plugin path, then it reconfigures all the tool-bar buttons to plugins that are in that path, but weren't previously assigned to that toolbar. And it'd be a extra plus if I could assign a my own little icons to the plugins of my choice. Them all having the same default icon means I have to scroll over a long tool-bar of plugins and read each tool-tip to find the one I want. (I so wish that plugin authors would quit assigning their plugins by company names, how very annoying! I constantly loose track of a good one I like because I can't remember what damned company wrote it. Some good plugins I've lost forever this way (after reinstalling OS's). Their AND my loss.)

[Gerhard Huber]

One small feature that seems to be missing, and I am always hunting for, is a way to move a text-editor layer while I'm still in text-edit mode

We will talk about this.
In the mean time, you can press "ESC" to come to the layer move tool, move the layer and then double click on it to come back to the text edit tool.

Also, I know its been discussed to death, but I too would LOVE having a way to run those "PhotoShop ONLY" plugins.

you can't solve this problem bei dll's. The problem is that Photoshop offers a very big API suite for the plugins that can't be fully build by another host application. Most plugins don't use this, but the plugin SDK includes some dummy functions of the suite to make plugins only run in Photoshop.
If you have plugins that won't work with PL32 send me the name, I will try to get a demo and test it.

p.s. Can anything be done yet about keeping my plugins in order on a customized toolbar?

It's not so easy as it looks like. PL32 builds the plugins menu entries dynamically, when the plugins are loaded. So every time you change the pathes or add/remove plugins, it will be created new. This will change your custom bars. We will talk about a solution for this.
You can setup an icon for the plugins like for every function in PL32.
To do this, load the "Pictures.pld" file in your hlp folder. Here you can find all predefined icons. If you want to create icons for plugins you can insert it here and setup the layer name to 9000 for the first, 9001 for the next and so on.


Gerhard

[Koyaanis]

you can press "ESC" to come to the layer move tool, move the layer and then double click on it to come back to the text edit tool.

Thanks for the shortcut tip. I was looking for an easier way to toggle between the two. And thanks too for looking into adding that.

If you have plugins that won't work with PL32 send me the name, I will try to get a demo and test it.

I was afraid that it wouldn't be that easy. (i.e. some dll files) Ah well, maybe those plugin authors will realize one day how much they are limiting their income by just writing for PS.

I think most of the PS-ONLY plugins that I already use have already been mentioned by others. But the next time I run into one that I really like I'll remember to get the name of it to you. The problem is so many of them were nice, but since I had to use PS to run them I deleted them. I just didn't want the hassle of having to run them through PS. The last one I found that was PS-ONLY you fixed by just making a similar function (only better!) in your up-coming PL32 V13.90

So every time you change the pathes or add/remove plugins, it will be created new. This will change your custom bars. We will talk about a solution for this.
You can setup an icon for the plugins like for every function in PL32.
To do this, load the "Pictures.pld" file in your hlp folder. Here you can find all predefined icons. If you want to create icons for plugins you can insert it here and setup the layer name to 9000 for the first, 9001 for the next and so on.

Thanks for looking into that again. With so many plugins to try out at times I'm afraid to add some because I know I'll have to reconfigure my toolbars again. And ... has anyone else noticed that if you change your toolbars, they go blank? I have to drag them to free-floating, then dock them to the side again so the icons show up. Not a big issue, but it's been this way forever. Maybe it's just my graphic-card drivers or something.

THANKS for that info about the icons!!! I did not know this! That's going to be great for customizing them!

p.s. And thanks again for making such a great program! And even more importantly, actually listening to the end-users and implementing their (usable) requests. You are rare among the software world. This is how it was back in the 80's. A cooperation between users and authors make the best software. This is how PSP got so good in the past (until Corel bought it and trashed it, and they don't care what the users need anymore).

[Koyaanis]

You can setup an icon for the plugins like for every function in PL32.
To do this, load the "Pictures.pld" file in your hlp folder. Here you can find all predefined icons. If you want to create icons for plugins you can insert it here and setup the layer name to 9000 for the first, 9001 for the next and so on.

Hmmm... this isn't going to be as easy at it first sounded. I can't keep the list of all my plugins open in the Options panel while counting them (to know what number to name that layer to assign to that icon in the file). And then when I do it doesn't seem to assign it to the right plugin most of the times. I can put in layer 9083, but it might end up on plugin #78 or #92 or something like that. The best I could do would be to have 150 icons numbered 9000 to 9150 and hope that nice ones show up on the ones I use. And then if I add or delete even one plugin, they'll no longer be assigned to the ones I wanted them on anyway. Ah well.

Nice to know it's at least possible. But it could take me days just to get the right icon assigned to the right plugin button. After getting them how I'd want them, then it would make me very afraid of ever adding or deleting a plugin ever again. Maybe PL32 V14.6 might have a simpler method.

[Gerhard Huber]

Nice to know it's at least possible. But it could take me days just to get the right icon assigned to the right plugin button. After getting them how I'd want them, then it would make me very afraid of ever adding or deleting a plugin ever again. Maybe PL32 V14.6 might have a simpler method.

Today we talked about your suggestions.
I am sorry, but it's not possible to move a text layer by clicking on the border of the text ruler because we plan for the future to set the text ruler into the normal window ruler. The advantage of this would be that you can always see the text ruler.
The best way of moving text layers when the text tool is active is
- press "ESC"
- move the layer
- press "ESC" again and you will be bag at the text tool

Plugins that you will always use would be best placed in a "Plugins" folder in the PL32 "Default" folder. This plugins will always be first loaded and this way there should be no problem when you try additional plugins.
I see no possible way to assign a fix ID to the plugins because they are dynamically loaded when PL32 starts. The load queue is "Plugins" folder, load path1, 2, 3, 4. So you can put your prefered plugins in load path 1 also. But put it into a subfolder and prevent them this way to be mixed with other plugins. To add icons for the plugins should be no problem this way.
BTW, plugins in one folder are always loaded in the sequence you copied them into this folder.

Gerhard